Rosanne Cash

Rosanne Cash has spent more than a decade making terrific music, hardheaded and
openhearted, and has never broken through to the mainstream. As the daughter of Johnny
Cash, an artist damaged by his own stardom, Cash retains well-grounded suspicions toward
conventional standards of "making it." Such profound ambivalence often leads to great
music, and Interiors is a great record. Producing herself for the first time, Cash s... More >

With husband-producer Rodney Crowell down to "guest vocal," she's on her own. Not only is this the first time she's produced herself, it's the first time she wrote all the songs--only once before has she even come close. Musically it's singer-songwriter rock, though as always Cash redeems tasteful arrangements with high-quality melodies and intense vocal focus. But lyrically this prolonged meditation on a marriage in pain is country at its best, because country is marriage music and Cash knows the territory. Anger, fear, separation, transcendence, change--this woman has thought about the tough stuff. Most of the time she has as much to say as, to choose a random example, Woody Allen girding himself up for a big statement. And even when she's corny, her seriousness is so palpable that the emotional effort carries the songs. (Grade: A-)